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The launch of the Nature-Study Review in 1905 by Maurice A. Bigelow, a faculty member at Teachers College in New York City, marked the high point of the nature study movement. This chapter explores how Bigelow, as editor, provided a forum for discussion that balanced theory and practice and addressed the concerns of teachers, administrators, and educational psychologists. The Review and its related Nature-Study framed society as a set of mechanisms for stabilizing a definition of the curriculum and appropriate coordinate practices. Nature study was a lively topic at meetings. Its association...

The launch of the Nature-Study Review in 1905 by Maurice A. Bigelow, a faculty member at Teachers College in New York City, marked the high point of the nature study movement. This chapter explores how Bigelow, as editor, provided a forum for discussion that balanced theory and practice and addressed the concerns of teachers, administrators, and educational psychologists. The Review and its related Nature-Study framed society as a set of mechanisms for stabilizing a definition of the curriculum and appropriate coordinate practices. Nature study was a lively topic at meetings. Its association with poetic literature is probably largely responsible for fostering sentimentality as opposed to knowledge. Nature study advocates shared a different, historically rooted sensibility; they believed that there was no firm distinction or conflict between appreciating nature aesthetically and studying it systematically. Nature study had been rhetorically and substantially framed as a reaction to narrow, dry methods of teaching scientific facts, so when poetry and imaginative literature proved effective at awakening pupils’ interest and curiosity about the natural world, teachers used them.